WITH HIS authorship of the seminal Afrobeat: Fela and the Imagined Continent and such other influential texts as 'No Woman No Mask: Ki-Yi M'bock and the Recommendation of a Gendered Drama', 'What is Contemporary African Dance'', 'Lace Fashion as Heterogglossia in the Nigerian Yoruba Cultural Imaginary' and the work co-authored with Remi Raji-Oyelade, Thunder-God on Stage: The Life and Times of Duro-Ladipo, Olusola Olorunyomi, without doubt, has made the insightful world of pages his most esteemed abode.Born a natural Rasta in the hazy harmattan of Bauchi, that dusty Thursday, November 1961, 28, to a Baptist family, Olusola Dada Olorunyomi, in the dawn of life, showed an uncanny interest in the moonlight tales and performances that characterise the innocent fantasy of the normal child. He also cultivated his other interests and his penchant for sporting activities and, interestingly that early, developed a serious concern for civil rights matters as Sola would boldly stand and speak up for other pupils bullied by so-called senior boys at the Sunday School and later at the Abdul Azeez Attah Memorial College (former Government College) Okene, where he was also the editor of the press club between 1977 and 1978. Perhaps it was there that his passion for music for he is also known today as a bassist began to flourish as he was coordinator of the Rimmer Kids Band, a music club named after the British principal of the school, Mr John Rimmer who had earlier died in a plane crash. At about the same time, precisely 1976 to 1978, in the Rimmer Kids Band, Olorunyomi experimented with a couple of Fela numbers, and did some Bongos Ikwe as well as tunes from the Ookun Yoruba and the Ebira Ekwechi.The young Olorunyomi found himself at the Kwara State College of Technology in Ilorin in 1979, but got rusticated before the end of term. By this time, it was obvious to everyone that the anti-establishment stance and proclivity of Olorunyomi towards government or administration activities which compromised egalitarianism and justice had begun to bud, as it was in the same year that he, Femi Falana, Issah Aremu, Abdulrahman Black, Chom Bagu and Yusuf Mohammed, all of them young men then, founded the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) after the 1978 ban of the Segun Okeowo-led National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), in the aftermath of the Ali-Must-Go protest.His revolutionary ethos led him to briefly live with Papa Shope, the Representative of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa in Nigeria, meeting with many of the South Africans who would later become leaders of independent South Africa. His fraternity with the ANC might have been inspired by his brief stint at the 33rd Regular Course of the Nigeria Defence Academy (NDA), Kaduna, as the quest for liberation, justice and equality flowed in the veins of a man described only recently by the Nigerian literary community as 'a fifty-year-long insurrectionary event', in allusion to his radical energies in intellection and social activism.He was, however, recalled to civil society duties in 1982 when he resumed university schooling at the University of Ilorin. It was at UNILORIN, later reputed for the famous ASUU 49, that Sola Olorunyomi was expelled as SUG president, after leading his campus in a non-violent, left-wing West African students' union protest against the IMF and World Bank neo-liberal policies on Higher Education in the West African sub-region. That hastily-taken decision was, however, not only a setback to the union, and perhaps to Olorunyomi's health but a fundamental inspirationto other students who sought freedom from the oppressive grip of the then military government and the IMF policies championed by the Nigerian state.In the ferment of Third World revolutionary initiatives of the seventies and early eighties, the young Sola would be found in the remotest corners of the African continent, Europe or Central America, adding a voice to the urgency for a New World Order that could privilege the global South. Between 1984 and 1985 he was trudging the jungles of Central America. His closest shave in this dangerous path came when he served the Nicaraguan Sandinista army, the FSLN (Sandinista Front for National Liberation) in the La Trampa border region with Honduras, then Ronald Reagan's entry point to thwarting the idealism of Third World revolutions. Sola insists that he was a mere coffee harvest hand and a literacy activist. But his weather-beaten camp diary sometimes revealed such lines as ''all afternoon, we were being pounded by artillery fire from the other side of the mountain'withdrawing gradually from the frontline we arrived Corinto Finca to find a BLEP member dead'then a hasty wake-keep'' This was after he had briefly travelled through Libya, Soviet Union, Northern Ireland and Cuba.In 1985, he returned to Nigeria where he became an independent researcher and a freelance journalist. Since then, Sola Olorunyomi's research has primarily been in the field of cultural studies, with a specific emphasis on comparative literature. Over the years, he has researched extensively on themes in this area, particularly across West Africa and the Caribbean. He is also a master of the creative travelogue and many of his tours have been documented in the Glendora Review. Here, West Africa simply comes up fully lit: flashing through all of Tahoua, Abalak, Argadez in the high era of Touareg rebellion in Niger Republic; the intricate crevices of Dogon rituals in Mali; the enthroned carnival of reels in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso; or the emotionally disturbing evidence of the slave castles off the coast of Dakar, Cape Coast or Elmina.He later also became a trade unionist with the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria. A particularly noble effort of Olorunyomi's is that members of the Union at that time remember him for his organisational skills as he helped to organise the mortuary workers association, an important arm of the Union while also schooling alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, between OAU, Ife, UNILAG and UI to study English, Industrial Relations and Mass Communication as a way of concluding his first degree somewhat derailed since 1979.A FATHER and an uncle to countless many, Sola Olorunyomi is a member of the African Literature Association (ALA), Africa/Africa-Diaspora; Fellow, Salzburg Global Seminar, Austria; and was a recipient of the grant award of the Prince Claus Fund, The Netherlands.His research and teaching experience spans Africa, Europe and North America. Back at home at the University of Ibadan, he was a lecturer in the Department of English where he taught courses in Modern African Literature, Literary History and Theory, Folklore in Africa, Popular Literature, Literature and the New Media, and Oral Literature in Africa. He is now in the Institute of African Studies where he just completed his tenure as Sub-Dean (Postgraduate). In his work in IAS UI, he brings insights from cultural studies and critical theory to bear on his teaching in a variety of multidisciplinary courses in Performance Studies as well as in the Peace and Conflict Studies programme.Olorunyomi, who has over 25 research publications to his credit, has attended and presented papers in numerous major conferences across the world, notable among which are: the Pan-African Festival of Film and Cinema, Ouagadougou (FESPACO), since 1990; the conference on 'Music and Censorship in West Africa,' Goree Island, Senegal, 2005 an event organised by the World Forum for Freedom of Musical Expression (FREEMUSE), Copenhagen, Denmark; and the 34th Annual African Literature Association (ALA) Conference, April 22-27, 2008, Western Illinois University, Macomb, USA.Described by many of his students, most of whom have never known him to put anyone down or think anyone's suggestion to be unworthy of consideration, as one of the most humane scholars of his time, Sola is currently working on a book titled 'Modernities of Islam(s) and the Yoruba Cultural Imaginary'. Through IFAnet, a leading information and literacy research and advocacy NGO, modelled on the Paulo Freire tradition, Olorunyomi has recorded many successes among rural farmers and market women through IFanet's many capacity-building projects. His social philosophy comes out evidently in his interventions on behalf of indigent students on campus but also in the dusty streets and shops of Bodija and Sasa markets, and in the scorchingly hot atmosphere of the famous Dawanau International Market of Kano, where IFAnet is engaged in robust computer literacy and agro-economic extension work with Hausa-Fulani market women and their children.It is to Olorunyomi's vision of IT education for the disenfranchised, and his passion for sustainable development that these children, including the many Bodija sex workers and truckers who have also been trained in HIV/AIDS prevention skills, owe their respect and gratitude.Olusola Dada Olorunyomi, current National ASUU Officer on Human Rights issues and the Director of the University Media Centre (UMC), UI, is married and enjoys the privilege of a daughter's fusion of the strange and the familiar.
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